When An Angel Dies
by Cyborg-Kirara
Summary: A nurse loses her first child patient


**This is based on a true story.**

**My mother worked as a nurse for most of her life and has seen many things, but she said the hardest part was accepting that even despite your best efforts, people may still die. Names and all have been altered.**

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When an Angel Dies

Being a nurse, one should expect to see some disturbing things. Even though I had only been on the job for almost a year, I had seen my share of missing limbs, horrible gashes, people impaled in the most uncomfortable ways with an unusual assortment of objects. I had begun to think I had grown somewhat immune to such surprises that liked to stroll through the emergency room doors from time to time. Unfortunately for me, and for Matthew Thomas, I was dead wrong.

I was working the late shift that weekend while another of a series of monstrous thunderstorms was snarling outside the hospital doors. The hospital was a little shorthanded due to it being Labor Day weekend and many of the staff had gone on family vacations, so I was drafted to cover for several of the missing nurses. This included more bedpans and paperwork than I usually cared for. Though I did love my job, it was days like this of tedious repetitiveness that made me foolishly wish for some excitement every now and again. Apparently, the storm outside agreed with me entirely.

Shortly after I finished the last of a mountain of paperwork, I heard the telltale wail of an ambulance as it came charging up to the emergency room entrance ramp. As one of the other nurses, Melinda, rushed down the hall, she yelled, "Come on, Kim! I heard the EMT say that there was a bad wreck on the interstate and they're bringing the patients here. We're going to need help in the O.R. From what Tina said, it's pretty bad."

I shot to my feet, nearly toppling the tower of papers that I had just completed, and dashed out into the hallway. As I made it to the operating room, ready to don my sterile gown to protect my scrubs from any fluids that were sure to be spilled, I nearly got run over by the gurney rushing to get to the operating room. My heart leapt into my throat. On the gurney lay the limp, bloody, and bruised body of a little boy.

I looked down the hall, and though the swinging doors had closed on the emergency room's waiting room, I could hear the hysterical sobbing of a woman who was hastily scribbling on the mandatory paperwork to allow for the surgery to take place to save the boy's life while the doctor had him whisked away. Though cut, bruised, and shaken, the woman looked relatively unharmed. From their similarity in looks, fear on her face, and the fact that she had signed the permission slip for the surgery that can only be signed by parents or guardians, I assumed this woman was the boy's mother.

Someone calling my name brought me out of my trance and I turned to see Melinda, already covered from head to toe in the mint green of the gown. "Come on already, we've got to get an IV started."

I rushed to finish the task of getting dressed and when I skidded into the operating room, the boy's vitals had been recorded, an IV had been shoved into his tiny wrist, and he was getting x-rays of his chest, arm, and leg, all of which had signs of severe trauma.

Dr. Khan read the x-rays, quickly assessing the situation. "He's got a broken ulna, radius, tibia, and several broken ribs. From the looks of that fluid build up, his lung has been punctured and… oh, God. That rib has cut the heart. We have to move quickly, ladies. Hurry!"

Melinda started rubbing down his small chest with betadine to clean it. "Drape him, Kim," she ordered tersely. I got the child into sterile drapes, then Melinda, Dr. Khan and I gently, but hastily, moved the boy to the operating table. Melinda and I began hooking him up to an assortment of machines, his lifelines until we could repair the damage.

Dr. Khan made the incision right down the sternum, the bone at the center of the chest, connecting to all the ribs. With the bone saw, he cut the bone visible through the incision to gain access into the chest cavity. Even though my hands were shaking, I helped Melinda quickly start a blood transfusion to keep the child's blood levels from falling too low from the surgery and from what kept leaking out of his damaged heart. Then we had to draw blood for the blood gas test to check the oxygen levels in the boy's blood. Through all that I could not make my hands stop trembling.

Though I had been involved with several surgeries before and cut into several bodies before, nothing could have prepared me to watch as this child was opened before me on the operating table. It was a radical difference from the adult patients I was used to and the adult cadavers I had worked with in medical school.

With a sharp crack, Dr. Khan spread the ribs apart. Blood erupted from the opening, splashing onto the floor, the table, and all our gowns. Even though I knew to expect this, I jumped, flinching back from the child's blood as if it were a deadly acid. Melinda and Dr. Khan were too preoccupied to notice my immature behavior.

"Suture his heart," Dr. Khan said, as Melinda handed him the sutures. We watched, eyes flicking from the doctor to the machines, monitoring the patient for any sign of problems, hardly daring to breathe so as to not break the doctor's concentration. After few tense moments, sweat began to shine on his brow. I dared to whisper, "What's wrong?"

"I can't get the sutures to hold," he said, voice rigid with the intensity of his focus. Then after another try, he jumped back as though the sutures had bitten him. "Damn it!"

"What?" Melinda and I cried, rushing forward. Dr. Khan's hand dove for the sutures as they fell into the child's chest.

"I ripped the cut! It's larger! I can't get the blood flow to stop!"

"What!" Melinda shrieked.

"You heard me! Help me get the sutures! We've got to stop this bleeding!"

Melinda's arm dove into the tiny chest too to retrieve the other set of sutures. Suddenly the machines started screaming. His blood pressure was falling fast.

"He's losing too much blood!" I exclaimed.

"Kim, help me!" Melinda said, removing her arm from the body. "Apply pressure to his heart! If this doesn't stop, he'll bleed out!"

As she backpedaled, I took her place and, trying not to damage it any further, I put pressure on the area around the cut. I could feel every beat, every ounce of blood that oozed out from under my fingers.

After quite a bit of scrambling around me, Dr. Khan and Melinda tried their best to shut off the torrent of blood that was quickly seeping out of the little boy's body. But, despite their best efforts, I could feel each beat grow weaker and weaker. Finally, one of the machines let out that horrible whine telling us the boy had flat-lined. His heart had finally stopped. He had bled out as Melinda had predicted.

Covered in the child's blood, I released my hold of his tiny heart and glanced up at the clock. My chest tightened as I realized that from start to finish, our failed surgery had taken all of ten minutes. I could not believe it. What had felt like a fight of ten lifetimes had really taken less than a quarter of an hour.

"Well," Dr. Khan said, shoulders slumping with fatigue, "help me close him up. Melinda, go clean up and tell the boy's mother, will you?"

Melinda nodded. We sewed up the gaping hole and I took over cleaning up his body. Melinda when to go change and Dr. Khan went around shutting off the machines. After this was finished, he left to change as well, leaving me alone with the boy.

I went through the paces, removing my bloody gloves and cleaning his body of the blood. Only when it was completed did I permit myself to look at his face. It was still round like a baby's, his blonde curls falling into his eyes, which had remained closed since the first moment I saw him, thankfully unconscious through all this horror. With too little blood in his tiny body, the face was ghostly pale, even his tiny lips. It gave him an ethereal quality, as though I were gazing upon the face of a fallen cherub, caught in the crossfire of the biblical wars of the angels.

There was no way he could have been more than five years old.

My hand shook violently as I reached up and gently pushed a lock of hair from his face, my throat tightening, my eyes becoming blurry with tears. Down the hall, I heard a sound that still haunts me in my darkest nightmares. A mother's futile screams for her lost baby boy.

Pivoting quickly, I dashed out the operating room down to the nurse's lounge. Slamming the door, I ripped off my gown and threw it to the floor. Harsh sobs racked my body. I collapsed into one of the armchairs tucked into the room. Holding my head in my hands, I wept.

Why? Why could I not save him? I had my hands on that heart, held his life in my hands, and I let it slip through my fingers along with his blood.

I had never felt anything like this before. Like everyone else, I too had suffered pain from the death of a loved one but I had never felt such an intense pain over one of them. Few have felt a pain as strong as the one that rocked me to my core over the death of this complete stranger. Honestly, I knew I should have felt nothing. I am a nurse; therefore, death comes with the profession. I was going to see a lot of it. So why did this boy's death hurt me so? Why was it that all I want to ask was, "How could this have happened?"

I jumped as the door opened. Through my tear-blurred vision, I could barely make out the figure of Melinda, gently shutting the door and making her way over to me. Sitting down in the chair closest to me, she asked, quietly, "How are you holding up there, Kimmy?"

This just brought a fresh round of tears and I could not answer her through the sobs. Quietly, she simply rubbed my back and whispered comforting words to me. When the sobs finally subsided enough to allow me to talk, I whimpered, voice cracked and hoarse, "I lost him… why?"

"He was badly hurt, sweetie," Melinda said, patting my shoulder soothingly. "We did all could."

"It's all my fault," I choked out. "I had to stop the blood… and I… I couldn't."

"No, no, Kim," Melinda said, firmly but kindly. "There was nothing that could have been done. I know. I was there. I was watching and I saw you do your best to stop him from bleeding out. I could not have done better myself."

Though I was skeptical of these words, I used them as a mantra to allow myself to calm down. Wiping the last of my tears from my cheeks, eyes puffy and burning, I turned to Melinda and forced a weak smile. "Thanks."

"No problem," she said, standing. As she walked out the door, she paused and looked back at me and added, "I know it sounds terrible, but it does get easier." With that, she left.

Sniffling, I looked at my watch. There were still four more hours on my shift. Taking a few deep breaths, I stood and straightened my scrub jacket. I still had a few more bedpans to tend to. I had to get up and move on.

**

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**_DEADLY CAR ACCIDENT CLAIMS TODDLER'S LIFE_**

_Bethany Thomas, a young mother of the Newberry area, was driving home with her 4-year-old son Matthew when, due to all the rain received this past week, Bethany's car hydroplaned. She lost control of the vehicle and the vehicle, according to witnesses, flipped a total of three times before landing right side up and sideways in the road. From there, the car was struck in the back passenger's side door by an oncoming vehicle whose driver claimed to have had no time to react to prevent the collision. Matthew had been strapped into his toddler seat in the back seat on the passenger's side, consequently suffering injuries from the impact of the collision._

_He and his mother were transported by ambulance to Newberry County Memorial Hospital. Matthew was rushed into surgery for his critical injuries though sadly past away at 10: 35 pm last night._


End file.
